By Glenn Fleishman

October 14, 2025 11:05 AM PT

How to tell what’s playing audio on your Mac

My friend and editor Joe and I were trying to talk.¹ But something on his end continued to produce sound, and he couldn’t tell what it was. After some exploration, he realized that we had started using Slack’s “huddle” feature for a one-to-one audio chat and switched to FaceTime. He hadn’t hung up in Slack, and it was playing goshdarned hold music.

He said, “Shouldn’t there be a way to figure out which app is producing sound?” I said, yes—and then couldn’t immediately determine how. The two of us have approximately 7,500 years of Mac experience between us, so I hope you’ll never feel bad if you can’t solve a problem right away, either.

There are a few ways you can track down unwanted sound.

Browser muting

We all remember how we’d leave a tab or window open in Safari and then some time later, the Web site would reload the page or use other trickery and start playing an ad. We’d have to search through every open page to find the jerky one. Let’s be honest: some of us have hundreds, even thousands, of open tabs. This was a big job.

Apple added some visual indicators and menus to help you sort through. It evolved over the years, but the last several versions of Safari show an audio icon on any tab with audio playing, as well as in the Smart Search field (the old “URL bar”).

You can take several contextual actions:

• Tab: Click the audio icon on a tab, whether it’s the active one or not, and it mutes that tab’s audio.
• Smart Search field, current tab playing audio: Click the audio icon on the field, and the current tab’s audio is muted.
• Smart Search field, no audio in current tab: You can mute all tabs in all windows, not just the tabs in the current window, by clicking the audio icon on the field.
• Smart Search field, Control-click/right-click: Control-clicking/right-clicking the audio icon on the field lets you choose Mute This Tab (if it has active audio) or Mute Other Tab(s), which mutes every tab in every window that’s playing audio, except the current one—it could be playing audio or not.

You can also select Window > Mute/Unmute This Tab or Window > Mute/Unmute Other Tab(s).

Chrome and Firefox (and Chromium browsers, among others) all offer tab muting and discovery, too, using an audio icon on a tab and Control-click/right-click menus for mute and unmuting.

The sound of one hand apping

Apple doesn’t offer a system-wide “what’s playing that sound” tool. (Now Playing, via System Settings > Menu Bar in Tahoe, seemingly only reveals apps using some macOS audio framework, like Music and Safari.) I found two solutions, neither of which is cheap, but if it’s a recurring problem or you want app-specific, sophisticated sound control, you might enjoy adding one of them to your Mac’s soundscape-control repertoire.

• SoundSource ($45): Like many of Rogue Amoeba’s products, SoundSource captures many different desirable audio-related features into one place that Apple hasn’t provided much or any access to within macOS. Among those is that any app playing audio appears in a list.
• eqMac ($3 per month, $30 per year, $40 lifetime): An app with an interface that more closely resembles physical audio soundboards, eqMac also reveals which apps are squawking, showing them automatically on the leftmost edge of a scrolling list of active apps.

I’d have to make a deep study of the two apps to tell you whether one is superior to the other among the many features they offer, including headphone equalization, app-specific audio volume and effects, and many others. Fortunately, both offer trial versions, so you can test them out to see which fits your needs and your interface interaction style better.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

October 14, 2025 10:52 AM PT

Maybe it’s time to rename the Apple TV 4K

So on Monday, Apple whispered a name change in a press release, and now Apple TV+ is just Apple TV.

I’m okay with the decision. When everyone calls your service one thing, it’s probably best to just go with it and simplify. Everyone calls it “Apple TV.”

I would argue that the existence of the TV app (which everyone calls Apple TV), and the Apple TV 4K (which anyone who knows it exists calls Apple TV), adds a little complexity for people in the know, but contextually, it all kind of makes sense. While it’s not clean, and it’s a little silly, we all can survive with the current state of the Apple TV brand.

However, I will suggest that the mystery of the Apple TV 4K hardware box could be simplified if it were just given a new name. Apple is reportedly investing a lot in future home products, including a smart screen, likely arriving next year. The HomePod is still out there. And in the living room, it’s Apple TV.

It gets me thinking: maybe it’s time to just rename the Apple TV 4K.

“HomePod” is actually a pretty great name. The speaker products, eh, they’re fine, but the name is good. It’s got “home” right in there, it references the iPod, and the phrase “pod” is so flexible that you can affix it to just about anything.

So maybe Apple should just appropriate the HomePod brand and use it for all its smart-home products. The Apple TV 4K can be the HomePod TV. The speakers become HomePod Speakers. And that new display thing can be called HomePod Display or Control or something.

Chances of Apple actually doing this: Pretty low. Like I said, inertia and context probably solve this problem just fine. But I do like the idea of grabbing the lapels of the Apple TV 4K and yanking it out of the street before it’s run over by Apple’s streaming ambitions.

By Jason Snell

October 14, 2025 9:24 AM PT

Looking for the red flags in Apple’s Formula 1 TV deal

Apple’s been working closely with international racing circuit Formula 1 for a few years now, bringing “F1: The Movie” to the big screen and, on December 12, to Apple TV. Formula 1’s TV rights in the United States are currently up for bid, and Apple is reportedly working to extend and deepen its F1 relationship.

John Ourand, the excellent sports business reporter now at Puck, reported last week that Apple got a deal to broadcast Formula 1 in the U.S., and it’s due to be announced shortly, perhaps even this weekend:

The number I keep hearing is $140 million per year for U.S. rights, a significant bump from the $90 million per year that ESPN currently pays.

The main holdup had been a dispute around Formula 1’s streaming service. Apple stuck to its original position that the racing circuit needed to shut down F1 TV in the U.S., and was reluctant to dole out $140 million on rights fees just to have the races carried on another streaming service. Because F1 TV is profitable in the U.S. market, Formula 1 has been hesitant to pull the plug. It’s not entirely clear where the two sides netted out on this, but it’s an area to watch when the deal finally gets announced. Meanwhile, this will be Apple’s most significant sports rights deal since it signed a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with the MLS three years ago.

The issue here is that there are currently two different ways to watch Formula 1 in the U.S.: on ESPN, via standard television pathways, or streaming on F1’s subscription product, F1 TV Pro, for $85/year (or $130/year if you want it in 4K with multiview). So what is Apple buying for a 55% increase on what ESPN currently pays? Is it just buying the rights to a simple video stream, or does it want to capture the entirety of the F1 audience in the United States?

The first option seems very unlike Apple. Other than bringing a few new viewers into Apple TV, how does showing races in America (most of them very early in the morning) show off Apple’s brand and technological prowess? The entire point of a streaming-only product is that once you’re off traditional TV, you can go beyond the single stream and provide interactive options. The whole point of streaming TV, especially sports, should be that you can leave the flat video stream behind and build something cool using software.

That is, by the way, what F1 TV Pro is: A sophisticated bit of software that merges track data with multiple cameras to let viewers choose how they want to watch races. It’s absolutely the product that Apple should aspire to build, or co-opt, in this deal.

I understand that Formula 1 owner Liberty Media is reluctant to lose a profit center, but if Apple’s paying them an extra $50 million, isn’t that the proper trade-off? Also, working with Apple in the U.S. could be part of a longer-term tech partnership between F1 and Apple that could extend worldwide.

It’s a bit mystifying. I really don’t know how this is going to play out, but here are some possibilities:

• Apple just picks up what ESPN is doing, a simple video stream. I’m sure it isn’t what Apple wants to do, but maybe that’s all that’s on offer. It’s packaged similarly to MLS Season Pass ($99/year), with a discount offered to Apple TV subscribers, with the occasional race made available outside the package as a teaser. (A question: Would Apple continue ESPN’s practice of just using the Sky feed from the UK rather than building its own broadcast team? I really, really can’t see it, but this is already the worst among Apple’s options, so who knows?)

• There’s some sort of weird co-branding deal where Apple sells subscriptions to F1 TV, splits the proceeds with F1, and in the U.S., the F1 TV app uses Apple’s feed and announcers instead of the ones usually provided on the F1 stream. Apple ensures that the F1 TV app is expanded across all of Apple’s platforms with some whizzy new features. And a simpler feed of just the race is available inside the TV app.

• Apple erases F1 TV access in the U.S. and offers its own equivalent instead. A new app across Apple’s platforms (including Vision Pro) gives access to multiple camera views and race data in exchange for an annual subscription fee. In this scenario, maybe the flat ESPN-style race video is available to all Apple TV subscribers.

The more I think about it, the more the last option is the only one that makes sense from an Apple perspective. A simple video stream is essentially a legacy product, especially in a sport that’s rich with data and a perfect fit for an interactive experience. If that’s all Apple can get from F1, I guess we’ll know that Apple really wanted to extend its relationship with them beyond making “F1: The Movie” and this was the only partnership on offer.

If F1 chooses to hold on to F1 TV in the U.S. rather than take advantage of the opportunity to build a partnership with a global tech giant that could eventually extend around the world… it feels like a failure in vision. I realize Apple may be offering more money, but if all they’re allowed to do is take ESPN’s place, it would probably be better to make the cheaper deal with ESPN and reach a broader audience. Making a deal with Apple should mean building a richer technological partnership.

So far, Apple has been very careful in its bidding for sports rights. I suppose we’re about to find out if it’s got a big plan for Formula 1, or if it’s just desperate to keep rubbing elbows with the world’s greatest race drivers—and is willing to pay a premium for an underwhelming product.

By Joe Rosensteel

October 13, 2025 2:58 PM PT

Apple TV+ gets a new, familiar name

As a little addendum to the press release announcing when “F1: The Movie” would be available to stream Apple changed the name of its video streaming service from Apple TV+ to… Apple TV:

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.

Naturally, the obvious joke that occurred to everyone reading this news was “Apple TV in the Apple TV app on the Apple TV” —or some nearly identical variation on that. How confusing it is that they are all named the same thing!

But they aren’t actually named the same thing. That little black box Apple sells has been named Apple TV 4K for the last eight years. The TV app has a big Apple logo in its icon, but it’s still the TV app, or Apple’s TV app, not “the Apple TV app.”

Of course I wish Apple had never named its service Apple TV+, or any derivation of an existing product, but we’re way past that now. Unless you have a time machine to go back to 2019¹, there’s no point inventing a completely new name. It’s too late to call it Apple Rainbow or Apple Stream. Everyone already calls it Apple TV. This announcement is just catching up with reality.

This is the company that sells you a MacBook Pro M4 Pro and a MacBook Pro M4 Max. Naming isn’t its strong suit, and this is hardly the most confusing thing it has ever done.

Yes, this is all quite grating for nerds—what a polluted namespace!—but most people are much less focused on these details and it all burs together into Apple TV-ness. Sure, you’ll still need to ask clarifying questions about what someone is referring to when it isn’t obvious from context, but it mostly is obvious:

“F1: The Movie” is coming to Apple TV December 12th.

Is that confusing in any way?

There’s certainly room for improvement on coordinating the announcement of this rebrand so that it coincides with the name appearing on Apple platforms. The developer beta that was just released this morning uses the new rainbow gradient Apple TV logo (“a vibrant new identity,” I guess), but most of the interface elements are still labeled “Apple TV+.” Maybe next beta?

At least now, when we’re talking to normal people and they say things like, “I’m watching The Studio on Apple TV,” we won’t have some little gnawing urge to say, “You mean Apple TV+?”

Think of how much more likable we’ll all be after that! What a real plus!

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

By Dan Moren

October 8, 2025 8:41 AM PT

iPhone 17 Pro review: Orange you glad you’ve gone Pro?

My iPhone is orange.

I mean, really orange. Not “brown but if you hold it in a certain light, it kind of looks orange if you squint.” That in and of itself is a cause for celebration, as it finally brings some much-needed fun to Apple’s pro phone lineup. Pros like color too, you know? And for the ones that don’t there are perfectly respectable options of traditional silver or subdued blue. But the orange phone, well, you can’t forget the orange phone is orange, even when looking at it straight on where the orange frame limns the display with a constant halo.

The iPhone 17 Pro marks the most significant redesign of Apple’s pro phone lineup since its introduction with the 11 Pro. Sure, over time the phone has gotten a little larger, traded out the notch for the dynamic island, and added a few additional buttons. But the 17 Pro’s two-tone back and—sigh—iconic plateau make this phone instantly identifiable.

Also, the orange.

Continue reading “iPhone 17 Pro review: Orange you glad you’ve gone Pro?”…

By Jason Snell

October 7, 2025 1:50 PM PT

iPhone Air review: Back to the future

The more I think about the iPhone Air, the more I think back to the introduction of the MacBook Air back in 2008. I used the word “compromise” ten times in my review of that first lightweight Mac laptop.

If the story of the MacBook Air is a story about compromise, the decision about whether the MacBook Air is a product worth having can be answered by one question: How much are you willing to compromise?

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

This year’s selection of iPhones offers users a ridiculous amount of choice. The iPhone 17 has gained numerous features previously limited to the high-end iPhone Pro line. The iPhone 17 Pro has powerful new cameras and a new unibody look, including a spectacular Cosmic Orange color option. Back in 2008, the low-end MacBook and high-end MacBook Pro held similar positions.

Just like back then, an interloper has arrived that completely breaks up the high-end/low-end dynamic. The iPhone Air is priced in the middle, but doesn’t quite fit there. It’s an iPhone that doesn’t share the design priorities of other iPhones. It’s designed for people who also have different priorities.

There are dozens of obvious reasons to buy an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro instead of the iPhone Air. But when I hold the Air between my thumb and index finger and feel its weight and thinness, I begin to wonder how much those reasons matter.

Continue reading “iPhone Air review: Back to the future”…

By Jason Snell

October 6, 2025 12:24 PM PT

iPadOS 26.1 beta brings back Slide Over, adds microphone adjustments

Monday’s second beta for iPadOS 26.1 includes two highly requested changes from iPad users (including us) that were absent in this summer’s iPadOS 26 beta cycle: a return of Slide Over and the addition of USB microphone gain control.

Slide Over is back

In throwing out iPadOS’s old multitasking interface, Apple also chucked out a simple multitasking feature that it turns out was maybe a bit more beloved than anyone expected. Slide Over, one of the iPad’s original “multitasking” features, let you stash a single window off to the side of your iPad, so you could work full-screen on different tasks and still have quick access to information in another app. As I wrote in my iPadOS 26 review:

The loss of Slide Over, however, strikes me as an oversight on Apple’s part. It turns out that a lot of people use Slide Over as a simple way to keep an app hanging around for quick access, a very simple form of multitasking, and multi-window mode is overkill for this use case. I understand why Apple killed Slide Over: it was very easy for novice users to accidentally enable the mode and pretty non-trivial to deactivate it. (Perhaps Apple should consider a new approach that lets users dock an app off the side of the screen, as you can with a picture-in-picture window.)

In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, Slide Over is now an explicit part of the new multi-window multitasking view. To enable it, open a window and resize it so that the three “stoplight” buttons appear, tap and hold on the green one, and choose Add to Slide Over. Or choose Move to Left (or Right) Slide Over from the Window menu. Or type option-globe, left or right. All of those will work.

When Slide Over is invoked, the current window will be resized and stuck in the corner. You can grab the top of it and slide it off-screen, and it’ll vanish—only to reappear when you swipe your finger from off the side of the screen back on. You can stick the window on either side, and it’ll hang out there, regardless of whether you’re using full-screen windows or have a bunch of windows. You can even resize the Slide Over window when it’s on screen, and it’ll stay that size—unlike the old implementation.

Like Split View (which was reincarnated as two tiled side-by-side windows in multi-window mode), Slide Over only works in multi-window mode—but if you prefer to use your iPad apps at full size, you can just keep doing that even in multi-window mode. Nobody’s going to force you to make those windows smaller.

Slide Over only supports one app per display, so while you can only position one window on your main iPad display, if you use an external display, you can position a different app on that one.

Gain control for local capture

An issue with iPadOS 26’s new support for local recordings of camera and microphones was that you couldn’t adjust the gain on USB microphones, leading to some serious overmodulation on hot mics. In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, the local capture control in Control Center now includes a gain control. In our testing, this cured the issue involving the notoriously hot Audio-Technica ATR microphone popular with podcasters as a low-cost, portable option.

So in short: with its first major update to iPadOS 26, it appears that Apple has addressed two of the most glaring issues with its new feature list. I’m choosing to view that as a very encouraging sign.

By Glenn Fleishman

October 6, 2025 8:45 AM PT

Navigate your Mac without a mouse

Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?

Six Colors subscriber Tod was out of luck a few weeks ago, when he wrote me:

How is my dad supposed to pair a Bluetooth mouse to his iMac without a working mouse of any sort? We can get to the Bluetooth pairing screen using Spotlight, and the mouse is visible, but we can’t figure out how to press the Connect button with just a USB keyboard.

By the time I’d connected, Tod’s brother had gone off to collect some peripherals, and they were able to complete the process.

My immediate reaction was: Just press Tab or Shift-Tab. Had I tried this? No. When I did, I discovered my muscle memory had… what’s the opposite of atrophied? It was like a ghost limb, a ghost Tab/Shift-Tab sequence that didn’t work.

After some diligent research, including posts that had the wrong information, I discovered that all you need to do is press Control-Fn (or Globe)-F7. (See “A functional afternote” near the bottom of this article for more on that key sequence.) Using that keystroke toggles the option in System Settings > Keyboard for “Keyboard navigation,” thus restoring my ghost muscle memory to reality.

I think it’s worth digging deeper into cases in which you need an alternative to a mouse or a keyboard to complete operations.

The mouse that roars

I was present at a very awkward moment in 1992 between Apple’s then CEO, John Sculley, and a product manager for a software package. I was the “course manager” at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine. My job entailed a mix of keeping 100 Mac IIfx’s and lots of other gear running, and working with the education director (my friend Charles) to design curriculum. People visited to take multi-day courses on cutting-edge equipment.¹

During an invitational event, which tech industry and artistic luminaries attended, Sculley was there and getting some hands-on training with Atex Renaissance, a desktop-publishing application Kodak was developing to compete against QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker. Honestly, he was a very nice man to deal with, even when I was a lowly stiff. However, he took umbrage at one point—when a Kodak product manager was helping him use Atex.

Kodak Person: Just type Command-K and it will format the text.
Sculley: How do I do that with a mouse?
Kodak person: You can’t. The keyboard is better.
[Pause]
Sculley: No, it isn’t.

You could feel the frost in the air. Apple has been mouse-forward since even before the Macintosh, starting with the Lisa. Over 40-plus years of development, the mouse has almost always been a first-class citizen.

Sometimes—don’t tell Mr. Sculley—a mouse is worse. This is particularly the case for toggle states and repetitive actions that you can rapid-fire to more easily press, press, press on a keyboard.

If you want to know all the Mac keyboard shortcuts you can use, Apple maintains a convenient reference page that I have conveniently managed to avoid knowing existed until now. The list starts with things I imagine most of us have burnt into our fingers, and couldn’t speak the actual sequence required, like Command-grave accent (`) for rotating through open windows in the foreground app, or Command-Option-H for hiding all windows of all apps except the current foreground one.

It moves on to some more obscure ones, including using the power button with modifier keys, sometimes only available on keyboards that lack Touch ID. For instance, you can restart your Mac from a Touch ID-less keyboard by pressing either: Control–Command–Power button (don’t prompt to save unsaved documents) or Control–Option–Command–Power button (do prompt, just like Apple > Restart).²

You can elevate the keyboard even further through an Accessibility setting.

Key to success

Full Keyboard Access is yet another accessibility feature that offers specific benefits for individuals who cannot easily use a point-and-click device or are unable to use one at all, as well as general benefits for everyone who prefers an alternative to movement-based input. Enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Motor > Keyboard.

Once enabled, the thing you’ll notice most prominently is that you can tab through switches, buttons, and other fields that typically require clicking. As you press Tab or Shift-Tab, the focus moves through interface elements. Use the Space bar to select, and Control-Tab/Control-Shift-Tab to move among items that you can’t navigate through using the arrow keys.

You get some bonus modifier-key commands, too, using the Tab key uniquely as a modifier like you would Control or Option:

• Tab-W: Show a list of available windows in the current app.
• Tab-F: Search for items in the current view.
• Tab-A: Open the Application Chooser.

To view the full range of special commands, press Tab-H. You can customize the appearance and behavior by clicking the “i” info icon to the right of the Full Keyboard Access switch.

We put the fun in function keys

Many Mac users tend only to use function keys to control the features printed on them by Apple and third-party Mac keyboard makers, like increasing or decreasing volume or brightness.

To use a function key like F7 (labeled with a rewind symbol and F7 on Apple and third-party Mac keyboards) as an F7 key, you also have to press the Function key, typically labeled fn (in lowercase like that). On some Apple keyboards, it’s instead the symbol of a globe, possibly with fn in tiny type below it.

You can change that default, however, if you use function keys enough or prefer them to the Mac-specific features. Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Click Function Keys and enable “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.”

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]